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Japanese mom shows daughter how it’s done with awesome old-school gaming notebook

Casey Baseel May 25, 2013
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Every generation, something comes along that people are just sure is going to ruin kids’ minds. Recently it’s social networking websites. In the 1950s it was blue jeans and rock ‘n’ roll. If you had a time machine, and for some reason got tired of riding on the backs of dinosaurs and decided to instead interview cavemen about the parenting issues they faced, I’m sure you’d find some of them complaining about how the young whipper-snappers in the neighborhood are wasting all their time with this new-fangled “fire” thing.

When I was growing up, the big menace was video games, but just like all the things listed above, they turned out to be mostly harmless (but watch out, blue jeans become quite a bit more dangerous if you combine them with fire). Video games have now been around long enough that some hardcore gamers have kids of their own, such as the mother of Twitter user maki_pq, whose enthusiasm for the Dragon Quest series far outpaces her daughter’s.

Maki recently tweeted a picture of her mom’s handwritten notebook. At first glance it looks like a ledger of household expenses, sort of like the one my wife keeps with its damning evidence of my beer and watermelon expenditures. In actuality though, it’s filled with Maki’s mom’s memos compiled while playing video game Dragon Quest X.

Released last year, the main attraction of the tenth installment of the long-running series is its online play, a first for the franchise. Like most online role-paying games, Dragon Quest X is filled with monsters which randomly drop special items when defeated, along with a bazaar in which players can trade those items with each other.

Maki’s mother has compiled a detailed list of monster item drops, arranged in a chart in descending order of the enemy’s hit points. Also recorded in the notebook are the amounts of the items she’s collected, with daily notations, information about their relative scarceness and market prices in the bazaar, and happy little blurbs when her characters level up.

▼ More organization than our homework for freshman accounting class

Modern gamers may be surprised that the mother didn’t just download a FAQ with this information from one of the many websites dedicated to online gaming, but what kind of example would that lack of self-reliance be for her child?

The almost 60-year-old gamer got started on her hobby when Nintendo released the Famicom, known as the Nintendo Entertainment System in the West, 30 years ago, and has been playing the Dragon Quest series since its first installment came out in 1986. Internet commentators applauded the woman’s passion and dedication, to which Maki jokingly replied, “She’s just playing games and skipping out on her responsibilities as a mom!” In actuality the two often enjoy playing the game together.

With it doubling as quality family time, we see no problem with Maki’s mom’s hobby, nor the notebook that sprang from it, and have just one thing to say. Can we borrow it sometime?

Source: IT Media